rdfs:comment
| - The Fort Hood shooting was a jihadist mass murder that took place on November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others. It is the worst shooting ever to take place on an American military base. Several individuals, including Senator Joe Lieberman, General Barry McCaffrey, and others have called the event a terrorist attack. The United States Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies have classified the shootings as an act of workplace violence.
|
abstract
| - The Fort Hood shooting was a jihadist mass murder that took place on November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others. It is the worst shooting ever to take place on an American military base. Several individuals, including Senator Joe Lieberman, General Barry McCaffrey, and others have called the event a terrorist attack. The United States Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies have classified the shootings as an act of workplace violence. Hasan was shot and as a result is paralyzed from the waist down. Hasan was arraigned by a military court on July 20, 2011 and was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. His court-martial began on August 7, 2013. If convicted, due to the nature of the charges (more than one premeditated, or first-degree, murder case, in a single crime), he would have either been given the death penalty or life in prison without parole. Hasan was found guilty on all 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder on August 23, 2013, and was sentenced to death on August 28, 2013. Days after the shooting, reports in the media revealed that a Joint Terrorism Task Force had been aware of e-mail communications between Hasan and the Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been monitored by the NSA as a security threat, and that Hasan's colleagues had been aware of his increasing radicalization for several years. The failure to prevent the shootings led the Defense Department and the FBI to commission investigations, and for Congress to hold hearings. The U.S. Government has declined requests from survivors and family members of the slain to categorize the Fort Hood shooting as act of terrorism, or motivated by militant Islamic religious convictions. In November 2011, a group of survivors and family members filed a lawsuit against the government for negligence in preventing the attack, and to force the government to classify the shootings as terrorism. The Pentagon has argued that charging Hasan with terrorism is not possible within military justice and that even having the government classify the shootings as terrorism would harm the ability of the military prosecutors to sustain a guilty verdict against Hasan.
|